The first collection of writings and images focused on an off-reservation Indian boarding school, The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue shares the fascinating story of this flagship institution, featuring the voices of American Indian students.

In 1902, the federal government opened Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, to transform American Indian students into productive farmers, carpenters, homemakers, nurses, cooks, and seamstresses. Indian students helped build the school and worked daily at Sherman; administrators provided vocational education and placed them in employment through the Outing Program.

Contributors to The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue have drawn on documents held at the Sherman Indian Museum to explore topics such as the building of Sherman, the school’s Mission architecture, the nursing program, the Special Five-Year Navajo Program, the Sherman cemetery, and a photo essay depicting life at the school.

Despite the fact that Indian boarding schools—with their agenda of cultural genocide— often prevented students from speaking their languages, singing their songs, and practicing their religions, most students learned to read, write, and speak English, and most survived to benefit themselves and contribute to the well-being of Indian people.

The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue will be of interest to scholars and general readers in the fields of Native American studies, history, education, public policy, and historical photography.

Clifford E. Trafzer (Wyandot) is professor of American History and the Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs at the University of California, Riverside. He has written and edited several books, including Boarding School Blues, Native Universe, and Death Stalks the Yakama.

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert (Hopi), an assistant professor of American Indian Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the author of Education beyond the Mesas: Hopi Students at Sherman Institute, 1902-1929 (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), and co-produced a thirty-minute documentary film on the Hopi boarding school experience entitled “Beyond the Mesas” (www.beyondthemesas.com).

Lorene Sisquoc (Cuhilla/Apache) is Curator of the Sherman Indian School Museum in Riverside, California. She teaches Native American Traditions at Sherman Indian High School, and is a co-editor of Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences.

Education beyond the Mesas is the fascinating story of how generations of Hopi schoolchildren from northeastern Arizona “turned the power” by using compulsory federal education to affirm their way of life and better their community. Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, one of the largest off-reservation boarding schools in the United States, followed other federally funded boarding schools of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in promoting the assimilation of indigenous people into mainstream America. Many Hopi schoolchildren, deeply conversant in Hopi values and traditional education before being sent to Sherman Institute, resisted this program of acculturation. Immersed in learning about another world, generations of Hopi children drew on their culture to skillfully navigate a system designed to change them irrevocably. In fact, not only did the Hopi children strengthen their commitment to their families and communities while away in the “land of oranges”; they used their new skills, fluency in English, and knowledge of politics and economics to help their people when they eventually returned home.

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert draws on interviews, archival records, and his own experiences growing up in the Hopi community to offer a powerful account of a quiet, enduring triumph.

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert is an assistant professor of American Indian studies and history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His articles have appeared in American Quarterly, Journal of American Indian Education, and in edited volumes.

About the author

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert is enrolled with the Hopi Tribe from the village of Upper Moencopi in northeastern Arizona. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and a Dean's Fellow and Conrad Humanities Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Foreword to Kevin Whalen’s Native Students at Work: American Indian Labor and Sherman Institute’s Outing Program, 1900-1945

A Second Wave of Hopi Migration (History of Education Quarterly, August 2014)

Sun Chief: An Autobiography of A Hopi Indian by Don C. Talayesva, New foreword by Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert (Sept. 2013)

Marathoner Louis Tewanima and the Continuity of Hopi Running, 1908-1912 (Western Historical Quarterly, Autumn 2012). Winner of Spur Award for Best Western Short Nonfiction, Western Writers of America (2013)